The Rise of Liminal Authorities: Trickster’s Gaining a Craft, or the Techniques of Incommensurability

Abstract

Any situation of incommensurable liminality by definition first of all disrupts integrity and unity, breaking the whole down into its composite elements, and thus — in the current sense of the term — produces a crisis that must be dealt with directly. From this perspective the appearance of metallurgy as a technology that divides units into parts can be characterised as an anthropological and historical marker of crises.¹ What is more, this technological process handles crises in a mechanical, procedural manner, thus destroying the original composition of elements. Metallurgy as a technique was developed through an awareness of pain, using suffering to force objects to give up their original physical properties, playing with excess and enacting a new circle by confounding accepted ways of thinking.² In situations of crisis, this way of thinking reaches spiritual depth and produces significant effects, as it deprived entities from self-support, reducing life to subservience,³ as seen in the post- or pre-metallurgical alchemy, whose origins are uncertain, as the knowledge was secret, was forbidden to reveal, was enveloped in mystery (Thompson 1932: 43–4). In this way the crisis was resolved, though only by capitalising on the opportunity and using destruction to generate new and different entities.